Thursday, May 28, 2015

The first solo presentation of artist Frida Kahlo’s work in New York City in more
than 10 years, FRIDA KAHLO: Art, Garden, Life, focuses on the artist’s engagement with
nature in her native country of Mexico, as seen in her garden and decoration of her home,
as well as her complex use of plant imagery in her painting. On view from May 16 through
November 1, 2015, The New York Botanical Garden’s exhibition is the first to focus exclusively
on Kahlo’s intense interest in the botanical world.

Guest curated by distinguished art historian and specialist in Mexican art, Adriana Zavala,
Ph.D., the exhibition transforms many of The New York Botanical Garden’s spaces and
gardens. It reimagines Kahlo’s studio and garden at the Casa Azul (Blue House) in the Enid
A. Haupt Conservatory and includes a rare display of more than a dozen original paintings and
drawings on view in the LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Art Gallery.

Accompanying programs invite visitors to learn about Kahlo’s Mexico in new ways through
poetry, lectures, Mexican-inspired shopping and dining experiences, and hands-on activities
for kids. Bilingual texts in English and Spanish provide historical and cultural background, with
photos of the garden as it appeared during Kahlo’s lifetime.

THE GARDEN AND STUDIO AT THE CASA AZUL: CONSERVATORY EXHIBITION

The landmark Enid A. Haupt Conservatory at
The New York Botanical Garden comes alive
with the colors and textures of Frida Kahlo’s
Mexico. Visitors entering the exhibition view
a reimagined version of Kahlo’s garden at the Casa Azul (Blue House), today the
Museo Frida Kahlo, the artist’s lifelong home outside of Mexico City, which she
transformed with traditional Mexican folk-
art objects, colonial-era art, religious ex-voto paintings, and native Mexican plants.

Passing through the indigo-blue walls with embellishments in sienna and green,
visitors stroll along paths lined with flowers,
showcasing a variety of important garden
plants from Mexico. A scale version of the
pyramid at the Casa Azul—originally created
to display pre-Hispanic art collected by
Kahlo’s husband, famed muralist Diego
Rivera—showcases traditional terra-cotta
pots filled with Mexican cacti and succulents.

A niche adjacent to the pyramid contains a desk and easel, reminding visitors that Kahlo’s work in her studio was intertwined with her life in her garden. Visitors to the
Conservatory experience the Casa Azul as an expression of Kahlo’s deep connection to the
natural world and to Mexico.

KAHLO’S WORKS ON VIEW: ART GALLERY EXHIBITION

The LuEsther T. Mertz Library’s Art Gallery at
the Garden exhibits 14 of Kahlo’s paintings
and works on paper—many borrowed from
private collections—highlighting the artist’s
use of botanical imagery in her work.
Focusing on her lesser-known yet equally
spectacular still lifes, as well as works that
engage nature in unusually symbolic ways, this grouping of artworks includes

Self-Portrait with Thorn Necklace and
Hummingbird (1940);

Flower of Life (1944);

Still Life with Parrot and Flag (1951);

and
Self-Portrait Inside a Sunflower (1954).

The Art Gallery exhibition, curated by Dr.
Zavala, introduces visitors to the importance of plants and nature in Kahlo’s
paintings and her life.

Also on view are
large-scale photographs of Kahlo and the
Casa Azul’s garden, which are complemented
by photographs of Kahlo taken by
photographers and friends such as Nickolas
Muray.

Plant experts at the Botanical Garden have made some new historical
discoveries in Kahlo’s art, noting an accurate rendering of a cotyledon,
part of the embryo within a plant’s seed, in

The Dream, 1932.

Kahlo
created this work when she was pregnant and living in Detroit, drawing
herself asleep in bed with her long hair forming roots in the earth.
“It’s a quite surrealistic drawing, and I’d never even noticed the
cotyledon,” Zavala says. “It reaffirms our hypothesis – Kahlo worked
carefully from source material, as well as from her imagination. She had
countless books about plants in her collection and she collected
various specimens. She even tucked miniature bouquets of flowers
throughout the pages of a copy of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass.”

One of the most important paintings in the show is

Kahlo’s 1931 portrait of botanist inventor Luther Burbank,
who is credited with developing more than 800 varieties of plants.
Kahlo paints him sprouting from the ground, a plant in his hand and his
bottom half depicted as a tree. The painting can be read politically,
Zavala says: “This work was at the top of my list, not only because of
its subject matter but because Kahlo creates an extraordinary
human/plant hybrid – it reflects her thinking and beliefs in 1931, a
time when the mixing of species was anathema in places like Germany.”

On 26 June Koller will
bring to auction one of Ferdinand Hodler’s major Symbolist works, “Urkraft”.
This impressive figure painting was created in the first half of 1909 and takes
up the then-revolutionary theme of the “Lebensreform” cult of the body. The
work was formerly acquired directly from the artist by the German philosopher
and collector Eberhard Griesebach (1880-1945) and in 1942 it entered a Swiss
collection. From there, it will now be offered for the first time on the art
market. This well-documented painting is estimated to achieve CHF 400 000 to
500 000.

An additional top lot is presented by a rare large-format painting by
August Giacometti. The 113×150 cm “Marseille II” from 1930 is impressive not
only in size, but also through its captivating play of Mediterranean colours.
It is estimated at CHF 350 000 and 450 000.

Impressionist
and Modern Art

An
important painting by Chagall and three Renoirs

From the “painter poet” Marc
Chagall comes “La famille du pêcheur”, an oil painting composed of shades of
deep blue. Produced in 1968, it has been exhibited in major Chagall
retrospectives such as at the Pushkin Museum in Moscow in 1987, at the Galleria
d’Arte Moderna in Turin in 2004 and at the Museum of Art in Seoul. It will now
be presented at Koller with an estimate of CHF 2.5 to 3 million.

Three paintings
by Pierre-Auguste Renoir will lead the selection of Impressionist works offered
in the auction.

“La Bergère” was created by the master in c.1902 and is presen-ted
with an estimate of CHF 1 to 1.5 million.

“Baigneuse assise, de dos”

and
“Bouquet d’anémones”

both originate from 1917, and thus from the late works
produced by the artist. They are estimated at CHF 180 000 to 250 000 and CHF
250 000 to 350 000.

The auction will additionally feature a pencil drawing “Nu
couché” by Pablo Picasso from the period between 1942 and 1944, estimated at
CHF 180 000 to 240 000, and an ink drawing “Tête de jeune fille” by Henri
Matisse from 1950, estimated at CHF 240 000 to 300 000.

PostWar & Contemporary

Botero’s “Mother and Child” The
particularly impressive top lots of the Post War and Contemporary auction
include Fernando Botero’s oil painting “Mother and Child” from 2003, showing a
toddler sitting on his mother’s lap. Like many of Botero’s works, this one also
presents rounded bodies with exaggerated proportions, developed out of the
glorification of sensuality and life. The work is estimated at CHF 340 000 to
400 000.

Important rare works in this auction additionally include an
abstracted landscape created in 1963 by Jean Fautrier in shaded whites and
reds briskly applied in broad impasto brushstrokes, estimated at CHF 115 000 to
130 000,

as well as Hans Hartung’s large-format oil painting “T1958-18”, with
its swinging serrated forms lending the picture a sense of dynamic energy,
estimated at CHF 325 000 to 380 000.

Modern and Contemporary Prints

Paul Klee, Pablo Picasso and Andy Warhol

The selection of
modern prints offered in the auction includes a beautiful etching by Paul Klee.
This 15×17 cm work “Komiker” from 1904 is presented with an estimate of CHF 40
000 to 50 000.

Estimated at CHF 40 000 to 60 000, a complete portfolio of
“Portraits imaginaires” by Pablo Picasso with 29 signed and dated colour
lithographs after the painting series from 1969 will also be offered in the
auction, in addition to the portrait “Jeune fille inspirée par Cranach”,
estimated at CHF 30 000 to 40 000.

Top lots of the contemporary prints include
Andy Warhol’s colour silkscreen of a Goethe portrait. It was inspired by
J.H.W. Tischbein’s painting “Goethe in der römischen Campagna” which he had
seen during a visit to the Städel Museum in Frankfurt. It is estimated at CHF
35 000 to 45 000

Wednesday, May 27, 2015

This
spring, the Addison Gallery of American Art, located on the campus of Phillips
Academy in Andover, Massachusetts, will present Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard
of Modernism, a comprehensive exhibition celebrating the American painter’s
singular accomplishments and invaluable contributions to American art in the
early twentieth century. After securing a place as one of the most accomplished
late nineteenth-century American figurative artists, Maurer (1868-1932) went on
to join the ranks of the avant-garde.

From
his cross-fertilization of Fauvism between French and American circles to his exploration
of abstraction in his late radical works, Maurer proved to be a formidable
creative force in expanding the potential for artistic expression in American art.
Alfred Maurer opens will be on view through July 31.

Following
its run at the Addison, the exhibition will travel to Crystal Bridges Museum of
American Art in Bentonville, Arkansas,where it will be on view October 10, 2015–January
4, 2016.

“All
phases of Maurer’s artistic career are covered in this groundbreaking exhibition,
which features his fin-de-siècle figure paintings, scenes of contemporary
leisure, Fauvist works, landscapes and florals, heads and figures, still lifes,
and late abstractions, including the Addison’s own Still Life with Pears,” Susan
Faxon, the Addison’s Associate Director and Curator of Art Before 1950, notes. “While
Maurer is often characterized as a painter of divergent, seemingly
contradictory aesthetics, this careful study of his oeuvre reveals steady
interest in thematic ideas as well as formal experimentation with color, form,
and abstraction.

”With
an intimate knowledge of the most current French art and friendships with key
vanguard American art figures, Maurer was positioned at the nexus of new ideas
about art. He left New York for Paris to study in 1897 and remained there until
the outbreak of World War I. While abroad, he became an intimate of Leo and
Gertrude Stein’s circle of creative luminaries. Through his involvement with
the Steins, Maurer became one of the first Americans to experience the work of Henri
Matisse, as well as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Pablo Picasso, among others.

He
in turn played a key role in introducing fellow Americans to their vanguard artistic
salon, which was brimming with progressive art and ideas. Maurer continued to bridge
French and American Modernism through the sophisticated Fauve work he was
producing and exhibiting in Paris as early as 1906.

Witness
to and participant in the development of revolutionary artistic ideas, he was
perfectly poised to elucidate others in their quest for knowledge of the latest
artistic developments. This included such important collectors as Dr. Albert C.
Barnes, for whom Maurer served as an agent while Barnes was building his remarkable
collection of twentieth-century masterpieces.

Maurer
proved to be an invaluable contact for other pioneering American figures of the
day as well, including Walt Kuhn, Walter Pach, and Arthur B. Davies, who, in
the early 1910s,assembled the pivotal exhibition commonly known as the Armory
Show.

Following
his return from Paris, Maurer moved in the most current art sets in New York,
sustaining close friendships with individuals who were committed to changing
the direction of American painting. In his quest to forge new paths, Maurer produced
some of the most advanced and adventurous workby an American in the first half
of the twentieth century.

“The
pioneering spirit of American Modernism is crystallized in Maurer’s late Cubist
paintings, a body of work rich with pictorial possibilities. This is avirtual
treasure trove of American art that turns a lens on theart of innovation and expression
in the modern age,”Dr. Stacey B. Epstein, the exhibition’s curator, adds.

Alfred Maurer: At the Vanguard of
Modernism
is accompanied by a fully illustrated exhibition catalogue that documents many
of Maurer’s most accomplished works and includes a comprehensive examination of
Maurer and his cultural context by Epstein, whose thorough and original
research sets Maurer in his rightful place within American Modernism. This
impressive catalogue is the first published since 1973 to focus solely on Maurer’s
work.

the woman, cigarette in hand,
snidely glares at the viewer. Her tilted hat swoops like a bird. The
next two galleries bustle with Fauvist landscapes, portraits and still
lifes from 1907-14. Ecstatic, reborn, Maurer emulates Matisse, Maurice
de Vlaminck and André Derain. Entering these galleries is like walking
into a hothouse. In the best works here—including

“Fauve Landscape with
Train” (c. 1907),

“Landscape with Trees” (1909),

“Autumn” (c. 1912)

and a
series of “Fauve Landscapes” (c. 1908-12)—Maurer thinks, and breathes,
in color....

Max Kuehne was born in Halle, Germany on November 7, 1880. His family
immigrated to the United States in 1894 and settled in Flushing, New
York. Growing up, Kuehne led an active lifestyle and enjoyed many
outdoor activities; Richard, the artist’s son, fondly reminisced on his
father’s boyhood years, describing, “whatever job he held was somehow
always terminated by the advent of summer when the water was warm and
there was swimming from the East River piers, rowing races on the
Hudson, bicycle races at the Hippodrome, or sailing in Flushing Bay on
Long Island Sound.”

It was not until he was twenty-seven years old
that he began to formally pursue a career in art; despite such a late
start, Kuehne was fortunate to study under William Merritt Chase and
Kenneth Hayes Miller at the New York School of Art in New York City, and
later became a pupil of the renowned Ashcan leader Robert Henri. They
instilled in Kuehne the values and methods of both Impressionism and
Realism, which formed the foundation for his future career as an artist.

In 1910, Kuehne sought inspiration overseas and traveled to Europe,
where he bicycled through Germany, England, France, Belgium, and
Holland, often accompanied by his close friend and colleague Ernest
Lawson.

After returning to New York City the following year, Kuehne
set up a studio in Greenwich Village, where he became friends with
neighboring artists that included Guy Pène du Bois, William Glackens,
William Zorach, and Maurice and Charles Prendergast. The next four years
were spent producing urban scenes depicting the downtown life and
painting along the East River and its bridges.

During the summer of 1912, a pivotal shift in Kuehne’s career began
when he visited Gloucester, Massachusetts, which resulted in a body of
work described as “some of his most successful pictures, paintings full
of sunlight…[which revealed] the fact that he was becoming a colourist
of considerable distinction.”(3) From these early harbor scenes, a clear
understanding of subject matter and brighter color palette began to
emerge—characteristics which were further developed during a trip to
England in 1913 when he painted rocky seascapes of Cornwall. After
spending a year working along the Cornish coast, Kuehne moved to Spain
and fell in love with the country’s landscape and culture.

The city of
Granada became his home for the next three years, where he reconnected
with Ernest Lawson, who was also painting in the country at the time.
Kuehne absorbed elements of Lawson’s style while the two spent time
together in Spain, and incorporated his romantic approach into sober
nocturne scenes and mysterious, moonlit landscapes.

In 1918, after he returned to the United States, Kuehne spent the
summer in Cape Ann, Massachusetts, where, beginning in 1920, he would
return every summer. He eventually established a studio in Rockport, a
coastal town that inspired luminous marine scenes and dramatic
landscapes that are considered some of Kuehne’s best works. Two years
passed after his stateside return before the allure of Spain drew him
back to the country for a second time in 1920, and once more for a third
visit in 1922. He returned again in 1923, after which he spent a brief
time in Paris; the pictures painted that year demonstrate a unique
brilliancy and looser handling than his usual technique.

The artist enjoyed the patronage of several notable collectors of his
time, including Gertrude Vanderbilt Whitney, Mrs. Harry Payne Whitney,
Juliana Force (the founding director of the Whitney Museum of American
Art), noted critic and collector A. E. Gallatin, Archer Huntington,
Duncan and Marjorie Phillips, and Dr. Albert Barnes of the Barnes
Foundation. Kuehne’s works were widely displayed throughout his career,
including exhibitions held by the Carnegie Institute, The Art Institute
of Chicago, Worcester Art Museum, Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts,
Corcoran Gallery of Art, Society of Independent Artists, and Whitney
Museum of American Art, to name a few. During the Depression, Kuehne
expanded his career into the realm of decorative arts. He became quite
skilled in the art of frame making, crafting expertly designed, carved,
and gilded frames for not only his work, but also Maurice Prendergast,
Charles Sheeler, and Ernest Lawson.

Examples of Kuehne’s work are
included in prominent museum collections including those of The Barnes
Foundation, Brooklyn Museum, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, The Museum
of Modern Art, and Whitney Museum of American Art.

Chronology

1880 Born in Halle, Germany 1894 Moves to Flushing, New York1907 Begins formal training at the New York School of Art, studies under William Merritt Chase and Kenneth Hayes Miller1908 Enrolls at the National Academy of Design1909–10 Studies at the William Merritt Chase School with Chase and Miller, enrolls in night classes taught by Robert Henri1910 Spends the year abroad studying works in principal galleries in England, France, Germany, Holland, and Belgium1911 Opens studio in Rockport, Massachusetts1912 Spends the summer in Gloucester, Massachusetts1913 Travels to England, spends time painting along the coast of Cornwall 1914–ca. 1917 Visits Spain for the first time and ends up living there for three years, spends eighteen months residing in Granada1918 Returns to the United States, travels to Gloucester, Maine in the summer 1919 Spends the summer in Maine, paints in Bar Harbor and Rockport1920 Returns to Spain in July1921 Spends the summer working in Rockport, Massachusetts 1922 Returns to Spain 1923 Returns to Spain for the last time, spends summer and autumn in Paris1925 Takes up residence in Rockport, Massachusetts1940 Five etchings used as illustrations in James B. Connolly’s The Port of Gloucester; joins the Rockport Art Association

With Impressionism – Expressionism: Art at a Turning Point, the
Nationalgalerie, Staatliche Museen zu Berlin presents a groundbreaking
exhibition at the Alte Nationalgalerie from 22 May to 20 September 2015,
deliberately comparing these two artistic styles for the first time.
The Nationalgalerie was one of the first museums in the world to acquire
Impressionist paintings, beginning in 1896; by 1919, the museum had added an
extensive collection of Expressionist works. The comprehensive exhibition at the
Alte Nationalgalerie will trace the similarities and differences between these two
art movements, a process of comparison that began just after 1900. Over 160
Impressionist and Expressionist masterpieces from chiefly German and French
artists will be on display, assembled from the collections of the Nationalgalerie
and other museums around the world.
The development of Impressionism is associated with artists such as Claude
Monet, Edgar Degas, Camille Pissarro, and Pierre-Auguste Renoir in France and
with painters including Max Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Slevogt in
Germany. Works by Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Karl Schmitt-Rottluff,
Emil Nolde, and Franz Marc epitomize the powerful counter-movement of
Expressionism in Germany.
Occupying the entire middle floor of the Alte Nationalgalerie, the exhibition is
arranged according the principle shared motifs of the two movements. The main
hall is devoted to the theme of the city; further rooms treat night life in bars, cafes,
and restaurants, leisure time spent at the outskirts of the city, as well as themes
of family, artists, and art mediators. The motif of the bather opens the exhibition
and stands in sharp contrast to the final room with works from 1913 which
capture the simmering sense of unease at that time.
A comprehensive catalogue published by Hirmer Verlag accompanies the
exhibition, containing numerous essays and 230 full-colour illustrations.

No two other styles were as intensely and unsparingly contrasted with one another in their time as
Impressionism and Expressionism. Impressionism is inextricably linked with France and with artists
such as Claude Monet, Edgar Degas, and Auguste Renoir. The German Impressionism of Max
Liebermann, Lovis Corinth, and Max Slevogt developed in the 1890s as a response to the movement
in France. A fierce backlash followed shortly thereafter with the advent of Expressionism, spearheaded
by painters such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner, Erich Heckel, Emil Nolde, and Franz Marc in Germany.
The simultaneous emergence of these two styles provided critics and theorists with an ideal basis to
compare the seemingly antithetical cultures of France and Germany. It was gallery owner Herwarth
Walden who first spoke of a ‘turning point’ in the transition from Im(pressionism) to Ex(pressionism). Despite the stark distinction that would later be drawn between the two styles, Impressionism and
early Expressionism share surprisingly many characteristics. Both movements take an anti-academic
stance, hold painting en plein air in high regard, portray immediate experiences of light and colour, and
focus on the material details of the artists’ surroundings. In addition, subjectivity and the individual
character of each artist’s brushwork were highly prized among exponents of both artistic movements. The Nationalgalerie is closely tied to the history of artists working in both styles. Through its director,
Hugo von Tschudi, the Nationalgalerie was the first museum in the world to acquire Impressionist
paintings, beginning in 1896 even before the Paris museums. Tschudi’s successor, Ludwig Justi, on
the other hand, amassed a spectacular collection of Expressionist works after 1918 for the new wing
of the Nationalgalerie, at the former crown prince’s palace on Unter den Linden. Moreover, Justi
developed a ‘School of Seeing’ over many years, which aimed to elucidate the particular
characteristics of various artworks by comparing them to one another.
BathersVariations on the theme of the bather in pastoral and idyllic settings have been found since antiquity.
Bathing figures became a major motif in the paintings of late Impressionism and Expressionism as
well. Paul Cézanne's images of unclothed men or women by the water, were not painted from nature
but were carefully conceived and staged in his studio. They became the much-admired ideal for artists
from both movements. The naked bodies which no longer met ideals of beauty, the absence of a
mythological overlay and the reduction of shapes and spatial relationships all had a provocative effect.
They inspired Cézanne’s contemporaries Pissarro, Degas, and Renoir from the end of the nineteenth
century, and later influenced German artists such as Liebermann, Kirchner, and Pechstein. The modernist representations of bathers outdoors in nature, at the Moritzburg lakes and on the
beaches of the North Sea and the Baltic Sea were based on a dream of a benevolent togetherness,
close to nature and far from the stifling rules of the bourgeois world. Other painters looked for true
‘primitiveness’ in the South Seas, among the natives of Tahiti or Papua New Guinea. At the same time,
however, the artists’ representations of people bathing, resting, or drying themselves also celebrate
the pure joy of living and the appeal of nudity.

City, Suburb, Pedestrians Impressionism and Expressionism are urban cultures. Artists from both movements discovered the
beauty of the growing metropolises for themselves: from the 1860s, Claude Monet and his fellow
Impressionists were inspired by Paris, while from 1900, the Expressionists focused mainly on Berlin.
Both cities were a source of artistic innovations in their time. Rapidly changing cities with their increasingly busy streets, glittering lights, broad boulevards, and
bustling squares became a key motif for artists. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire described a painter
wandering through the city as a flâneur: ‘He is looking for that something which you must permit me to
call modernity.’ That ‘something’ also included darting pedestrians and cocottes in the city at night, the
new means of transport and electric lights. Cityscapes seen by rain, fog or snow helped artists
including Camille Pissarro and Lesser Ury, as well as Max Beckmann and Otto Dix, to make a variety
of artistic discoveries. The artists’ subjective sensibilities, which were a product of their respective
time, are captured in these images. The motif of the bridge crops up surprisingly often, including both traditional bridges over rivers and
the new railway bridges. Frequently, it is precisely these pictures that testify to a poetic treatment of
the cityscape, by means of reflections in the water and the depiction of space in atmospheric tones.

Out of Doors The idea and experience of leisure time developed in the nineteenth century as a result of
urbanization and industrialization, which entailed a life with fixed working hours. Leisure was seen as
the private part of one’s life, and was regarded as a counterweight to the all-consuming world of work.
Peace and quiet, amusing diversions and stimulating time spent together with friends and family
offered a change of scene and the chance to relax. Recently constructed railways allowed members of
the working class and middle class to travel to the city’s outskirts and into the countryside, away from
the noise and stench of the metropolis.
The Impressionists and Expressionists also heeded the call of the countryside and sought to redefine
their relationship with nature within the context of recreational spaces. Here, even more than in the
city, they employed the technique of painting en plein air using tubes of paint invented around 1840,
which dried up less quickly and were easy to transport. River banks, meadows, and gardens, public
parks, zoos, and lively spots in restaurants along the Seine in Paris or the Alster lake in Hamburg
served as the artists’ subjects. Impressionism and Expressionism were the last modern and
comprehensive styles to provide an unmediated, realistic view of ordinary people’s everyday lives.

The urge to travel to the countryside is as old as the city itself, dating back to antiquity.
Representations of villas in the verdant locations can be found in Pliny and Vitruvius, forming the
models on which architects and land owners based their country estates as late as the nineteenth
century. Most of these homes were surrounded by carefully landscaped gardens and parks and were
viewed as places of relaxation and repose. Shielded from the outside world, these estates served as
retreats from the hectic bustle of the city, offering their owners not only a chance to connect with
nature but also to increase their social standing. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the garden became a popular and important motif for the
avant-garde due to purely artistic reasons. Representations of gardens were not subject to an
established tradition but rather were set in opposition to the generic canons of academic painting.
Many artists including Claude Monet, Max Liebermann, Max Slevogt, and Emil Nolde acquired a

garden of their own. These gardens provided with a place to linger and offered the painter an
appropriate range of subjects he might study under the most varied light and weather conditions.
The phenomenon of the painter’s garden stems from this period. The play of colours itself was easily
as important as observing the light and the effect of the atmosphere on the colours.

Diversions The variety of establishments found in cities offered numerous options for socializing. Beginning in the
1850s, song and dance interludes offered by restaurants and known as ‘café-concerts’ were especially
popular. Such venues supplied the stage for the female clown Cha-U-Kao to perform, for the chanson
singer Emélie Bécat to sing risqué songs, and for can-can dancers to flounce their skirts. Vaudeville
theatres such as the Moulin Rouge or the dance hall at the Moulin de la Galette in the Montmartre
district of Paris also proved attractive. Ballets, operas and operettas, cabarets, theatres, fairgrounds, and circuses were part of a firmly
established entertainment industry. Conversations over drinks in smoky pubs and restaurants led to
fleeting sexual encounters – and lively artistic exchanges. Ludwig Meidner describes the coffeehouse
as a preferred location for meetings, diversions, and pleasures. Yet an oppressive undercurrent often
permeated this tremendous bustle, which many painters found particularly striking and worthy of
representation. In 1863, Charles Baudelaire described the artist Constantin Guys, the dégagé flâneur
of nighttime Paris, as a ‘painter of modern life’. Kirchner and Nolde recorded their experiences
exploring Berlin’s nightlife for inspiration in very similar terms.

The traditional roles of men and women shifted alongside the social and economic changes of the
nineteenth century. This period gave rise to the concept of the distinct individual. Popular magazines
and novels were filled with such themes as marriages of convenience or love, romantic affairs, and
personal tragedies. Writers created striking psychological portraits of failed marriages: the era of
Emma Bovary, Anna Karenina, and Hedda Gabler commenced in the 1850s. French and German Impressionism and early Expressionism originated from similar social conditions.
Both movements produced a surprising number of pictures of couples and families, many of which
were remarkably large in size. In a deliberate rejection of a Biedermeier-era family idyll, these
paintings do not simply reflect reality, but rather show new models for familial roles. They emphasize
the specific character of the individual rather than a couple’s togetherness or a family’s sense of
belonging. Those painted are often turning or looking in different directions. Manet’s work, for
example, is characterized by the vacant gaze of some of his subjects. Thus, in various ways, these
pictures reflect the shifting gender dynamic of the late nineteenth century.

Artists Impressionists and Expressionists alike painted themselves in numerous pair and family portraits.
Similarly, the standalone artist self-portrait is a recording of a particular moment. It simultaneously
expresses an idealized role and functions as an autobiographical statement. Max Slevogt shows
himself as a youthful artist, unconventional and approachable. Lovis Corinth stares critically at his
mirror image – he finds himself at a crossroads in his life. Max Liebermann, in contrast, consistently
represents himself as self-confident. Here, he depicts himself standing in front of his own paintings,
wearing a white painter’s apron over a suit. In his self-portrait, Expressionist Karl Schmidt-Rottluff set
himself apart from the ‘superficial’ paintwork of the Impressionists. A monocle glints in one eye, while
his other eye is closed. And Ludwig Meidner, who belonged to the group known as the ‘Pathetiker’,
looks alert and piercing in his self-portrait.

Portraits of fellow painter friends are less likely to contain this element of scrutiny. Corinth painted
Berlin Secession founder Walter Leistikow as the epitome of the ‘en plein air’ painter. August Macke
portrayed his friend Franz Marc as a discriminating interpreter of the world, with great empathy for
animals and his fellow man.

Paul and Bruno Cassirer, Julius Meier-Graefe, Hermann Bahr, Herwarth Walden, Rosa Schapire, and
many other art lovers promoted new trends outside the official academic art market in Wilhelmine
Germany.
Collectors and dealers, curators and critics made a strong case for Impressionism and Expressionism.
Hugo von Tschudi, then the director of the Nationalgalerie, was important for both art movements. He
was the first to buy paintings by French Impressionists for a German museum. And, around the same
time, the almanac Der Blaue Reiter, edited by the Expressionists Wassily Kandinsky and Franz Marc,
was dedicated to him.

Critics and theorists engaged with both Impressionism and Expressionism, reaching a wide audience
through their books, catalogues, articles, and reviews. Many of these art mediators cultivated friendly
relationships with the artists they supported, collecting their work and commissioning portraits. The
artists’ vivid portraits depict these proponents of Impressionism and Expressionism oscillating between
two quite different roles, namely, as the cosmopolitan dandy and the visionary prophet. The portraits
record these critics and theorists as intellectual partners on a shared path towards innovation.

In 1900, it was a firm principle of modern aesthetics that ‘a beet painted well is better than a poorly
painted Madonna’, to quote Max Liebermann. The hierarchy of genres was no longer irrefutable – the
subject of a painting had become secondary. ‘A bunch of asparagus, a bouquet of roses – these
sufficed for a masterpiece’.

Thanks to Gustave Courbet and the Leibl school in Munich, the still life took on a new significance: It
became a place for artistic experimentation. In still lifes, artists addressed painterly questions of
composition, colour, and technique. Perspective, light, surfaces, contrasts of colour and shape could
be varied and methodically studied even more easily in the controlled environment of the studio than
when painting en plein air or when working with a live model. Artists selected familiar items such as
apples, flowers, masks, or earthenware based on their forms and colours and positioned these objects
in distinctive arrangements.

The subject itself was less important than the act of painting; the still life
became the ‘touchstone’ of the artist (Edouard Manet).

Impressionism and Expressionism shared this idea, although each movement adapted the still life to
its respective style. The Impressionists’ guiding light was Manet, while for the Expressionists it was
Paul Cézanne, whom Julius Meier-Graefe dubbed the ‘father of modernism’.

Maurice Maeterlinck’s 1895 play Intérieur instances the importance and relevance of the concept of
the interior, which was experienced and staged as a protected, ‘holy’ alternative to public space. In the
early modern industrial age, interior space was more important than ever before for people’s ideas of
living and selfhood. Women, from whom the emancipation movement was still far off, were intimately
acquainted with the indoor world.

This is why Impressionists and Expressionists alike most often depicted women in their interior
scenes: some preferred women engaging in domestic activities and personal tasks, while others
mainly showed woman as nudes in a studio. Even models whom the painters knew personally
remained largely formal subjects through whom artists might study the relationships between colour
and form or between bodies and space. Renoir painted women, in his own words, as ‘beautiful fruit’,
and as spatial still lifes. Degas and Kirchner sought to arrest movements that were natural and
unfeigned, even commonplace. Fleeting ‘depictions of life’ (Lovis Corinth) were captured in these
pictures, painted as if peeping through a ‘keyhole’ (Edgar Degas). Thus the most intimate (and most
familiar) moments form the alluring, at times voyeuristic, subjects of both Impressionist and
Expressionist interior paintings.

Given the strictures of bourgeois life, the desire to return to nature as a site of origin factors into the
many representations of animals in Impressionism and Expressionism. The naturalness of these
creatures appealed to artists. The animal was an unencumbered subject with no associated greater
significance and it served as a proving ground for a new definition of art. ‘Intangible ideas express
themselves in tangible forms,’ wrote August Macke, ‘made tangible through our senses as a star, as
thunder, as a flower’ – or, one might add, as an animal.

German Impressionists discovered animals wherever they looked – in the countryside, on the
racecourse, in the zoo, and in cages – and were inspired by a hitherto underappreciated wealth of
colours, shapes, and movements. These artists merged representations of animals with their
environments.

For Franz Marc, the animal was a being with a soul and even became a more general symbol of life.
He wanted to paint ‘the animal’s own sense of experience’. From 1913, animals became a means for
Marc, Nolde, and Dix to express diffuse yet tangible fears. Curt Herrmann, for example, painted a
flamingo, which had recently died in a zoo, as an allegory for the war in 1917.

Premonitions of War. 1913 Even in the years before the First World War, Wilhelmine empire society was deeply divided, split
between bureaucrats, nationalists, and social revolutionaries. Friedrich Nietzsche had critiqued the
decline of European culture and morality, questioning his contemporaries’ belief in progress.
Anthroposophy, mysticism, socialism, and depth psychology supplied alternative models for explaining
society. A series of disasters – including the earthquake in Messina in 1908, the appearance of
Halley’s comet in 1910, and the sinking of the Titanic in 1912 – made an apocalypse feel threateningly
close at hand. The second Moroccan crisis in 1911 and the Balkan Wars in 1912/13 fuelled this
simmering feeling of unease. This powerless sense that the ‘end of days’ (Georg Heym) had arrived
was in constant conflict with a societal desire for revolution and renewal. The avant-garde flourished in this atmosphere. The ‘Neue Club‘ was founded in Berlin in 1909. At the
club’s ‘Neopathetic Cabaret’, controversial author Frank Wedekind gave readings, as did Heinrich
Mann and Franz Kafka, and Arnold Schönberg’s piano pieces were performed there as well. Georg
Heym and Jakob van Hoddis forged their ominous visions into powerful figurative verse. And
Expressionist painters created lasting images of the era’s lurking sense of uncertainty.

Ms.
Wesenberg used the different-size galleries within the museum to group
together works focused on 12 different themes. In the opening section,
called “Bathers. Dreams of Paradise,” Max Liebermann’s “Bathing Boys”
from 1902 hangs inches away from Ernst Ludwig Kirchner’s “Bathers at the
Shore,” from 1913, confronting visitors with the parallel subject
matter of people depicted splashing in waves, and the stark differences
of the rendering of the seashore and the figures. While Kirchner’s
undulating waves fill the canvas, and more abstract figures speak to a
freedom of movement, Lieberman’s stark horizon and more linear figures
create the stiff “appearance of a sports class,” Ms. Wesenberg said.

Although
the curator moved away from the original idea of grouping all of the
paintings in pairs, several key sets are sprinkled throughout the other
sections, stressing the opportunity to compare and contrast. Another
example is the pairing of Pierre-Auguste Renoir’s lush 1881 painting
“Chestnut Tree in Bloom,” with the green of the riverbank melting into
the motion of the river, with Erich Heckel’s “Canal in Winter” from
1913-14, depicting the heavy, dark lines of the trees arching, standing
in snow-covered banks in Berlin’s Tiergarten.

Special
attention was given to women, both as artists and subjects, said Ms.
Wesenberg, who included works by lesser-known female Impressionists,
such as a picture of a Parisian courtyard, “Houses in Montmartre” by
Maria Slavona, and a portrait of a woman standing before a mirror in
“The Cheval Glass” by Berthe Morisot.

Throughout
the sections, the motif of the self-confident, urban woman as she moves
through the city and sits by herself appears frequently in the
renderings of the Impressionists, as well as the Expressionists. Ms.
Wesenberg noted how the woman featured in Manet’s “In the Conservatory,”
from 1878-79, with her detached gaze and umbrella pointed toward her
husband, was considered scandalous at the time.